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[email protected] EDITORIAL The Big Libel Stick Cracking on Sheldon Adelson’s libel suit against Wall Street Journal reporter Kate O’Keeffe, a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal , John L. Smith, who has been on the receiving end of the billionaire’s wrath, said, “You’d think a guy who wasted $25 million on Newt Gingrich’s presidential candidacy would have developed a sense of humor by now, but apparently not.” Mr Adelson’s fortune may have failed to buy him theWhite House, but he’ll be damned if it isn’t worth more respect than he got in a recent Journal article co-written by Ms O’Keeffe that could be taken to imply that he lacks good manners. The story was about the protracted legal feud between LasVegas Sands Corp and Steven Jacobs, whowas fired as head of the company’s Macau operations back in the summer of 2010 for insubordination and exceeding his authority. Mr Jacobs claims he was forced out for refusing to go along with activities he believed were illegal. His lawsuit for wrongful termination, filed in Nevada state court in Las Vegas, has shined an unwelcome spotlight on some of the murkier aspects of the business of casino gambling in southern China and has LVS under investigation by the US Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the interests of fair comment, here is the passage that has driven the casino tycoon to Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance to demand justice: “In some ways, Mr. Jacobs, a 6-foot-5-inch-tall Ivy League graduate who colleagues say rarely curses, couldn’t be more different from Mr. Adelson—a scrappy, foul-mouthed billionaire from working-class Dorchester, Mass.” As Ms O’Keeffe alone is named as defendant—not the story’s co-author, Alexandra Berzon, the Journal’s principal gaming reporter in the States, not even the Journal or its publisher, Dow Jones, the only entities in a position to pay up—you have to think there is more to this. Certainly Ms O’Keeffe’s unvarnishedcoverageofMacauandofLasVegasSands’troubleswithMrJacobsandtheUSgovernment can’t have endeared her to the boss. That coverage has unfolded over the last two years with the aid of sources within the company and/or close to it and has been supported on several occasions by access to internal documents. Mr Adelson is not the only one in these parts who sees her as a problem. Not that he has ever been known to take it lightly when things get personal. In 2005, when LVS was pursuing casino licenses in the UK, he sued an executive with Unite HERE!, the US gaming industry’s largest trade union, over a pamphlet circulated at a Labour Party Conference describing him, among other things, as “perhaps the most vilified man in Nevada”. The case languished for years before it was finally thrown out by a British court. But Mr Adelson did win a settlement from the Daily Mail over it. He remains stridently opposed to organized labor—a major factor in his princely support of the Republican Party—and forbids unions in his Las Vegas casinos. He sued Las Vegas Sun reporter Jeff Simpson not once but twice. Both cases eventually were dismissed. (Mr Simpson is since deceased.) What got Mr Smith into hot water was a book titled “Sharks in the Desert”that Mr Adelson said defamed him. The costs of defending themselves drove both Mr Smith and his publisher, Barricade Books, to seek the protection of the US Bankruptcy Code. Barricade settled. Mr Adelson dropped the case. But not before Mr Smith won a court order requiring him to pay some of his legal expenses. He is countersuingMr Jacobs for defamation for accusing him in court documents of approving prostitution in his Macau casinos, a charge he vehemently denies. In the heat of last year’s US presidential race the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thought tomake hay of the charge, figuring anyone who was spendingwhat Mr Adelsonwas to tilt the outcome—a staggering US$98.5 million, as it would turn out, and very possibly a lot more than that, more than any individual inUS history—was fair game. Not so, as they foundout whenhis lawyers came calling. They quickly retracted their statements and issued an apology. This“should serve notice,”an LVS spokesman said, of the “very slippery slope” awaiting “those who would attempt to smear Mr Adelson by repeating the false and inflammatory statements of a fired employee”. The National Jewish Democratic Council is clinging to that slope. A political action groupwhose stated aim is to win“Jewish support for Democrats at the federal and state levels of government”— the complete opposite of Mr Adelson’s and no doubt galling to him—they made similar use of the prostitution charge, and while they did remove the offending material from their Web site, they refused to cave, defending their action as protected “political speech”. “Referencing mainstream press accounts examining the conduct of a public figure and his business ventures —as we did— is wholly appropriate,”NJDC Chairman Marc Stanley wrote in New York’s left-leaning Jewish Daily Forward . Mr Adelson is after them for $60 million. They vow to fight on. “We will not be bullied into submission,” they say.